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1 Jan Baetens Close Reading Hyperfiction. an Introduction. The Jan Baetens Close Reading Hyperfiction. An Introduction. The practice of hyperfiction, i.e. of electronic, non-sequential fictional writing, has given birth from its beginnings, say around 1980, to a wide range of theoretical comments, whose methodological scope and background cannot be reduced to one single paradigm. Roughly speaking, one could distinguish three main currents, in which the results of the impact of the so-called new media on literary production, imagination, and scholarship, has been discussed lively and without interruption until today. First, the field of the technology and media studies, following a line starting from Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media (1964), going through Brian Winston's Misunderstanding Media (1986; now rebaptized Media technology and society : a history from the telegraph to the internet, 2000), and Richard Grusin and Jay David Bolter's modern classic Remediation. Understanding New Media (Bolter & Grusin 1999). In this approach literary fiction does not seem doomed to oblivion, but to a sometimes merciless and painful, sometimes exciting and overwhelming redefinition of its power and opportunities due to the arrival of new and permanently renewed writing technologies and instruments. Although nowadays technological determinism is no longer uncritically accepted as the ultimate framework for the analysis of the history of writing and reading practices, its influence remains crucial if one wants to grasp why the introduction of electronic writing has been perceived --and almost lived in the flesh-- with either great devotion or real anxiety, even within the realm of 1 technology studies. Literature itself, however, plays only a minor role in this kind of research, where the hardware continues to be seen as the major axis of analysis. Second, there is also the field of a more philosophically oriented reflection on media, which in the United States is often linked with the --hard to define, and hard to circumscribe-- buzz-word of 'critical theory'. Electronic devices and electronic writing have been interpreted by authors such as Jay David Bolter (1991), Michael Joyce (1995), George Landow (1997, first 1992), to name just the most representative scholars of this tendency, as the literary and scholarly equivalent of the challenging of the millenary tradition of philosophical and philological a prioris establishing, defending, and maintaining the 'metaphysical' concepts of a subject that freely and confidently expresses himself or herself in speech, be it oral (the fundamental mode) or writing (the second-hand option). The clash with more nostalgic thinkers, such as Sven Birkerts (see his 1994 Gutenberg Elegies, once again a title paying a tribute to the work of Marshall McLuhan), has been very strong for a while, but the inequality of the competing forces was too considerable: it became very soon bon ton to feel pity with all those who doubted that one day we would take our e-books to bed or read them in a bath-tub (since that were the key examples endlessly reused by both adversaries and promoters of electronic writing). Other voices, however, although related similarly to the 'technological turn' of writing, and the reflection on writing, have been more cautious from the start. I believe this has always been the case for Stuart Moulthrop, whose thinking informs also an interesting collection on the question of print's survival: Geoffrey Nunberg's (1997) The Future of the Book. And I believe his viewpoint has now largely been adopted. Electronic writing may be a revolution, but at the same time it's also business as usual. 2 Third, and finally, electronic writing or electronic culture has been one of the main focuses of contemporary cultural studies, for instance in work by Katherine Hayles (1999). From this point of view, electronic writing is more than a technical device and an apparatus, more than a specific form and content, more than a new and new- fashioned institutional context, more than the extreme experience of proximity, immersion, interactivity, etc. it is on the contrary the whole set of these --mutually-- changing aspects of what Raymond Williams once called a 'cultural form' (Williams 1990, first 1975). In the cultural studies perspective, the difference between, say, British public broadcasting and American commercial television (the main example studied by Williams in his ground-breaking work on cultural practices) or between film as an exhibition and projection practice and film on television (the example thoroughly examined by John Ellis in his still influential Visible Fictions), is not a matter of new formats, new production modes, new types of spectatorship, and a change of machines, but the global shift from one set of intertwined elements to another. And just in the same way, one should tackle the transition from non- electronic to electronic or digital writing and reading in global cultural terms: new cultural forms raise from the electronic media, but as cultural forms they encompass those media, they are not restricted to them. Despite this stimulating diversity, until now little attention has been paid the hyperfictional works themselves, as if they were nothing more than the anecdotal pretext of a different interrogation. Of course there are exceptions, such as for instance the innovative study by Silvio Gaggi (1997), whose last chapter brings very careful and also very critical analyses of the 'writing’ and the 'mechanisms' of two landmarks of hyperfiction: Michael Joyce's Afternoon, the first hypertext to be included in the Norton Anthology of American Writing, and Stuart Moulthrop's 3 Gardens of Victory, generally considered one of the finest achievements of the first wave of the hyperfiction ‘genre’, with Mark Amerika's Grammatron. The 'second wave', I would argue, is represented by fictions which define their textual framework not in terms of reading but of experiencing a 'virtual reality', whatever the ambiguities of that notion may be (Janet Murray's Hamlet on the Holodeck (1997) gives a good introduction to those 'virtual reality' oriented textualities). Other examples of such close reading are to be found in Joseph Tabbi's electronic book review, whose reading gave me the first impulse to want to make this book. Generally speaking, however, the silence surrounding the very practical, in-depth but hands-on analysis of concrete works, remains astonishing. Many people, even when they are reasonably familiar with the topic of hyperfiction, find it very hard to just name specific works, since the difference between the practice and the theory in our reflexions on hyperfiction is very strong. At the same time, the reluctance to tackle issues in relationship with the --maybe old- fashioned-- practice of close reading, is not too difficult to explain. When surveying the reasons which could help us to discern why the minute and patient reading of concrete texts has not yet seduced contemporary scholars, one can easily list a set of explanations which largely reinforce each other. First of all there is of course the basic conviction that such a critical attention simply doesn't matter, or even that it is not appropriate to works belonging by a medium whose core is the absence of --literally-- fixed shapes and --literally-- fixed meanings (I must add 'literally', since one should never forget that in the traditional view of close reading, this reading discipline does not aims to produce 'the' meaning of 'the' text, but much more to unearth all possible types of ambiguities and irony). Second, there is also the idea, which is not completely false, that hyperfiction is born at the margins of a medium, the computer, 4 which at its start was more hardware than software oriented, and which probably continues to be so to a large extent. Just as in the first years of cinema, when films were made in the first place to promote the marketing of projection and recording machines (everybody remembers the strategic errors made by Edison during his first years in the film business), the important thing is not the 'content' but the apparatus (the PC, which grows old at unseen speeds). Third, one also often hears the argument that the hyperfiction field has not yet produced enough interesting works to justify a turn towards a more literal and literary tackling of the material. Once again, this thesis is not completely false, since many hyperfictions are not worth spending a lot of critical or scholarly acumen. Yet the essays collected in this volume demonstrate that there is also great unawareness in this respect. Indeed, if so many misunderstandings continue to surround the textual qualities and the high standards of concrete works under examination, this ignorance has much to do with the lack of a living --i.e. of a permanently challenged and transformed-- canon of works and authors. One of the secret ambitions of Close Reading Hyperfiction is undoubtedly to help advancing the creation of such a canon, despite the negative connotations of this word in current scholarship (most of all in the cultural studies scholarship for which this book feels great sympathy). Yet the shift from close reading to an approach mainly indebted to the broad contextual and ideological concerns of cultural studies, could be seen as a fourth and final answer to the intriguing lack of a systematic attention for the content of the (hyperfictional) text. The rejection of close reading in the traditional sense of the word, notwithstanding the proverbial exceptions, is an undeniable fact in contemporary cultural and media studies. This book claims that such an absence is a regrettable. It even claims that it is methodologically, theoretically, and ideologically impoverishing. Indeed, the more 5 one focuses on the materiality and the construction of concrete texts, the more it becomes possible to generate new readings of otherwise unread (because hastily read) hyperfictions, and the more one creates the conditions for a new and fresh interpretation of the different works.
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